The Hill earned its name because of its location, which is atop, yes, a massive steepness. When I arrived, there was just one road that led in, past a purposely under-marked perimeter fence, and then up a grade so severe that whenever the temperature dropped and the road iced over, vehicles would lose traction and slide backward downhill.
Just beyond the guarded checkpoint lies the State Department’s decaying diplomatic communications training facility, whose prominent location was meant to reinforce its role as cover: making the Hill appear as if it’s merely a place where the American foreign service trains technologists. Beyond it, amid the back territory, were the various low, unlabeled buildings I studied in, and even farther on was the shooting range that the IC’s trigger pullers used for special training. Shots would ring out in a style of firing I wasn’t familiar with: pop-pop, pop; pop-pop, pop. A double tap meant to incapacitate, followed by an aimed shot meant to execute.
I was there as a member of class 6-06 of the BTTP, the Basic Telecommunications Training Program, whose intentionally dull name disguises one of the most classified and unusual programs in existence. Its purpose is to train TISOs (Technical Information Security Officers)—the CIA’s cadre of elite “communicators,” or, less formally, “commo guys.” A TISO is trained to be a one-person replacement for previous generations’ specialized roles of code clerk, radioman, electrician, mechanic, physical and digital security adviser, and computer technician. The main job of this undercover officer is to manage the technical infrastructure for CIA operations, most commonly overseas inside American missions, consulates, and embassies. The idea is, if you’re in an American embassy, you can handle all of your technical needs internally. If you ask a local repairman to fix your secret spy base, he’ll definitely do it, even for cheap, but he’s also going to install hard-to-find bugs on behalf of a foreign power.
TISOs are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every machine in the building, from individual computers and computer networks to solar panels, heaters and coolers, emergency generators, satellite hookups, military encryption devices, alarms, locks, and so on. The rule is that if it plugs in or gets plugged into, it’s the TISO’s problem.
TISOs also have to know how to build some of these systems themselves, just as they have to know how to destroy them—when an embassy is under siege, say, after all the diplomats and most of their fellow CIA officers have been evacuated. The TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final “off the air” message to headquarters after they’ve shredded, burned, wiped, and disintegrated anything that has the CIA’s fingerprints on it to ensure that nothing of value remains for an enemy to capture.
TISOs work under diplomatic cover with credentials that hide them among foreign service officers, usually under the identity of “attachés.” The largest embassies would have maybe five of these people, but most just have one. They’re called “singletons.” To be a singleton is to be the lone technical officer, far from home, in a world where everything is always broken.
My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one before graduation—which I was told was fairly uncommon. For the first time in my IC career, at age twenty-four, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. Most of the others were just tech-inclined people straight out of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.
We called each other by nicknames more often than by our true names. My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count because, like the vampire puppet of Sesame Street, I had a tendency to interrupt class by raising my forefinger, as if to say, One, two, three, ah, ha, ha, three things you forgot!
We’d cycle through some twenty different classes, each in its own specialty, but most having to do with how to make the technology available in any given environment serve the government of the United States, whether in an embassy or on the run.
One of Warrenton’s major subjects of study involved how to service the terminals and cables, the basic components of any CIA station’s communications infrastructure. A terminal, in this context, is just a computer used to send and receive messages over a single secure network. In the CIA, the word cables tends to refer to the messages themselves, but technical officers know that cables are also the cords or wires that for the last half century or so have linked the agency’s terminals all over the world, tunneling underground across national borders, buried at the bottom of the ocean.
Closing in on graduation, we had to fill out what were called dream sheets. We were given a list of the CIA stations worldwide that needed personnel and were told to rank them in the order of our preferences. These dream sheets then went to the Requirements Division, which promptly crumpled them up and tossed them in the trash—at least according to rumor.
My dream sheet started with what was called the SRD, the Special Requirements Division. This was technically a posting in Virginia, from which I would be sent out on periodic tours of places where the agency judged a permanent posting too harsh or too dangerous—tiny, isolated forward operating bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the border regions of Pakistan, for example. By choosing SRD, I was opting for challenge and variety over being stuck in just one city for the entire duration of what was supposed to be an up-to-three-years stint. My instructors were all pretty confident that SRD would jump at the chance to bring me on, and I was pretty confident in my newly honed abilities. But things didn’t quite go as expected.
As was evident from the condition of the Comfort Inn, the school had been cutting some corners. Some of my classmates had begun to suspect that the administration was actually violating federal labor laws by requiring unpaid overtime, denying leave, and refusing to honor family benefits.
These grievances came to a head when the decrepit stairs at the Comfort Inn finally collapsed. A few of my classmates approached me. They knew that I was well liked by the instructors, since my skills put me near the top of my class. They were also aware, because I’d worked at headquarters, that I knew my way around the bureaucracy. Plus I could write pretty well—at least by tech standards. They wanted me to act as a sort of class representative, or class martyr, by formally bringing their complaints to the head of the school.
Within an hour I was compiling policies to cite from the internal network, and before the day was done my email was sent. The next morning the head of the school had me come into his office. He admitted the school had gone off the rails but said the problems weren’t anything he could solve. “You’re only here for twelve more weeks—do me a favor and just tell your classmates to suck it up. Assignments are coming up soon, and then you’ll have better things to worry about. All you’ll remember from your time here is who had the best performance review.”
What he said had been worded in such a way that it might’ve been a threat, and it might’ve been a bribe. Either way, it bothered me. By the time I left his office, it was justice I was after.
I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service Group. Then I copied the email to his boss.